The One I Was by Eliza Graham

Mum sounded doubtful. The mower was temperamental: spluttering out clouds of black, smelly smoke if it didn’t like the way you handled it. Even Smithy couldn’t manage it.
    ‘When’s Mr Andrews coming back?’
    ‘I don’t know that he is. His back is still hurting him and gardeners need strong backs.’
    But Mum seemed to put aside the worry about the long grass. She lay back so that a perfect shaft of clear light bathed her. If only Dad could see her now: despite everything, despite Granny dying, she looked beautiful. The tablets had made her put on weight, shecomplained, but her face looked better now, less thin. Mum was still taking them, because she’d promised Granny she would.
    It was only the three of us here today. Smithy was visiting her niece on her afternoon off. Sometimes it was more relaxing when she was away. You could leave out a tea mug on the kitchen table without it being immediately removed for washing.
    Don’t move, I wanted to tell Mum and Andrew. Let’s all stay here in the sun. If only Dad could come home now, this very afternoon, to see how well Mum was managing, how strong she was.
    Being at Fairfleet was still doing her good, even now. Granny had always claimed there was magic in the air, benefiting everyone who lived here. During the war she’d opened her home to the refugees from Germany. On an afternoon like this I could picture the boys out here on the lawn, or perhaps plunging into the lake for a swim.
    The view across the water would have been different all those years ago. Granny had sold a field adjoining the grounds six months ago and new houses were to be built on it. We had seen men with clipboards using strange instruments on legs to measure out the plots. In the spring Granny had planted a new hedge behind the lake, which would grow up and block the view of the new buildings.
    Above the baby hawthorns something bright flashed. A man. White suit and a Panama hat. Too smart for a builder. Perhaps he was a surveyor. I felt proud of knowing that word. But he didn’t really seem to be interested in the building site, standing with his back to the marked-out plots and gazing out across the lake towards us. When he saw me watching him he smiled at me and raised his hat, as though I were a grown-up. For a few seconds we stared at one another. Then he turned away.
    ‘Who was that?’ I pointed at the white suit as it retreated.
    ‘Who?’ Andrew squinted, but the man had gone.
    ‘A man in a hat, staring at us.’
    ‘What a nerve,’ Andrew said.
    ‘Thank heavens the new hedge will have grown up by next year.’ Mum frowned in the direction of the building site.
    But I didn’t think that the man had been rude at all. Perhaps I had just imagined him, though. I lay back on the soft grass, watching the boughs of the oak sway as they picked up a breeze too light to be felt down here. Minutes passed.
    The squeak of a rusty machine part made me sit up again. Someone was pushing a bicycle around the side of the house, past the tennis court. Whoever it was came closer. An intruder from the building site?
    He stopped. I saw a man in his early forties, or so I guessed. Dark-haired. Tall. He wore old but clean cotton trousers and a short-sleeved t-shirt, revealing strong arms.
    ‘Sorry to trouble you,’ he said to Mum. ‘I’m looking for work.’
    ‘We’ve got nothing to do with the new houses.’ Mum pointed down the drive. ‘The construction site’s back that way.’
    ‘I’m not looking for building work. I can do gardening. Or clearing out guttering, cleaning paving stones. Odd jobs.’
    ‘I don’t need any help, thanks.’ Mum gave a kind smile.
    ‘I’d try my hand at anything. Weeding, perhaps?’ he looked at the gravel, where weeds poked through. ‘Or lawn-mowing?’
    ‘I don’t think so.’
    I thought of how tired Mum had been recently, how she hated the mower with its bad-tempered ways. ‘Let him,’ I said. ‘At least the grass.’
    Mum’s mouth opened as though